In an age where colleges are looking at middle school athletes and getting verbal commitments from 13-year olds, I am reminded of a lesson my mother taught me at an early age. She said that one needs to find success before they take the next step and expect success.
Each step is essential and if we skip a step, it will come back to haunt us later in our life.
I have heard and witnessed athletes who are already thinking about earning scholarships to college even though they had never had success in high school.
Freshman athletes wanting to have success at the varsity level before they have success at the freshman level.
There are rare occurrences that this can happen but rarely do we take an eighth grade student with a large intellect and throw him into a senior level high school class. The eighth grader might have the intellect to accomplish the work but maybe the student does not have the emotional level to succeed in a senior classroom.
We seem to have missed this in many levels of athletics. If we see an athlete with talent, we automatically let our minds run with possibilities.
We need to remember the importance of each step. There is no step that is pointless. There is no step that absolutely can be skipped. Because we need that internal confidence of past success to get us through the failure. We need the emotional backbone to pick us back up after we have fallen.
A lot of these attributes are often unseen except in the athlete’s minds.
Don’t be in a hurry to get to our destination. It is a journey and we need to prepare for each step of the way.